Fall of the Northern Kingdom

II KINGS 17: 5-12, 22, 23; ISAIAH 28:1-4

GOLDEN TEXT: “For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish.”—Psalm 1:6

THE Israelites “did not believe in the Lord their God.” (II Kings 17:14) This sums up the sins of Israel from first to last. Lacking true faith in God, they did not see the necessity of obeying his statutes and keeping his laws. God sent his prophets and seers to warn them of impending disaster, but these warnings had little effect. For short, intermittent periods, when a better than average king ruled over them, they showed some signs of reforming; but on the whole the imaginations of their hearts were evil, selfish, and idolatrous. They “did not believe,” and this sin of unbelief was the root of all their backslidings, and finally led to the destruction of their kingdom.

This sin of unbelief plagued Israel from the day they left Egypt, but the decline of the nation became more rapid following the revolt of the ten tribe kingdom against Rehoboam, which was instigated by Jeroboam. This was not contrary to God’s will, for he had told Solomon that he would rend the kingdom from the Davidic line, saving only Judah to be the tribe through which would come the “one whose right it is” to rule Israel and the whole world. But the fact that God permitted this rebellion does not excuse the sin of. Jeroboam in leading the Israelites still further from the Lord; nor does it excuse them from the responsibility to following the sinful course of Jeroboam.

The account states that the “children of Israel walked in all the sins of Jeroboam which he did; they departed not from them.” it was not, therefore, a case of a temporary deviation from the right course, but a consistent and continuous doing of wrong—the great wrong of worshiping false gods. Apparently they went the full way, in this worship of idols, causing their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire, sacrificing them thus to Moloch. This particular form of heathen worship on seems in some respects to foreshadow the worship of the torment deity as it has been practiced by so many throughout this Gospel age; God is particularly displeased with this misrepresentation of his loving character, even as he was angry with the worshipers of the torment deity in the days of typical Israel.

The ten tribes of Israel were taken captive into Assyria by the Assyrian king, Shalmaneser, and it is well to keep this separate in our minds from the later fall of the two tribe kingdom in the days of Zedekiah, when he and his people were taken into captivity in Babylon by King Nebuchadnezzar. This latter captivity lasted officially only seventy years, but the ten tribes, while released from Assyrian captivity, probably had little interest in returning to the Promised Land even though set free. They had become avowed worshipers of the gods of the heathen, and were quite satisfied to be absorbed by the Gentiles and thus lose their identity as the chosen people of God.

To this day, this segment of the nation of Israel is referred as the “ten lost tribes.” They are not lost in the sense that they will never again have an opportunity to receive the blessings of God; for in the resurrection a “Deliverer shall come out of Sion and turn away ungodliness from Jacob.” But they are lost to the special honor of joint-heirship with the Messiah in the future work of ruling and blessing the world. Some, who do not understand the plan of God, have in recent years tried to establish the identity of the ten lost tribes in the Anglo-Saxon race. It is very doubtful if this identity is correct; but even if it is, it would mean nothing so far as the plan of God today is concerned. The ten tribes were cast off from God because of their unfaithfulness; hence, whoever their descendants today might be, they could not properly lay claim to any of the royal promises which were made conditionally to the natural seed of Abraham, It was not lightly said that the Lord would “give Israel up because of the sins of Jeroboam, who did sin, and who made Israel to sin.”—I Kings 14:16

I Kings 12:23 indicates that in addition to the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, there were also a “remnant of the people,” evidently of the other ten tribes who did not rebel against Rehoboam. This would explain why the New Testament indicates that representatives of all the tribes of Israel were in the land of Judea at the time of our Lord’s first advent. Jesus explained that his ministry at the time was to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel,” and evidently, those for whom he was seeking were not the ones who had been taken to Assyria and did not return.

Our Golden Text expresses a divine principle which operated with precision in the case of Israel. They were ungodly—continuously and persistently ungodly—so they perished from being his chosen people. “The Lord knoweth the way of the righteous,” also, It is a way of faith in this present age, and the rewards of faith are seldom seen or appreciated by the faithless. In the kingdom age it will be a walk by sight; and then he godly will he openly and materially blessed.

QUESTIONS:

What was Israel’s greatest sin?

Are the ten lost tribes of Israel still lost?

When, and under what circumstances will those who were taken captive in to Assyria receive blessing from the Lord?

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